Part A Text 1 At current online-ed rates, it is almost impossible for web publishers that create t

Part A Text 1 At current online-ed rates, it is almost impossible for web publishers that create their own content to make money—just ask any of the two dozen, from Z.com to eCountries that have gone bust in the past month alone. The mason for the bloodbath is : advertisers are not willing m pay enough for web ads to support the cost of displaying them. To see why, consider a credit-card firm that wants to find customers online. Say it runs a campaign to display its banner ad to 2 million viewers. Using industry averages, one out of every 200 viewers can be expected to click on the ad: one out of every 100 of those will actually sign up for a credit card. Thus, the campaign would yield 100 new customers. Offline. the firm pays about $150 for each customer it acquires, through anything from direct mail to television ads. Using the same rate, it would therefore be willing to pay $15.000 for those 2 million online-ad views, or a cost-per-thousand- views (CPM) rate of $7.50. Now consider the economics of the website that is running those ads. It probably does not have its own ad sales team, so it is getting those credit-card ads from an advertising network such as DoubleClick. The network takes half the revenues, leaving the site with a CPM of $3.75. Imagine that the site is very successful, say among the top few hundred on the web. If so, it may be able to generate 10m page views ’a month. At $3.75 per thousand views, that means revenue of $37,500 a month. Take out hardware, software and bandwidth costs, and enough might be left to support two employees or so. This grim picture can be improved by selling more than one ad per page. but such clutter often comes at the cost of a lower rate of "click-throughs" and, ually, even lower CPMs. The site can try to charge higher CPMs by providing more information about viewer demographics, to help advertisers target their ads, or by claiming that it has a sign that may justify a fee for brand-building advertisers. But advertisers are skeptical. The biggest web portals get their content almost for free—a mixture of material from other-sites and content created by viewers—and attract so much traffic that they can support huge organizations on low CPMs. But for most smaller websites, there is no way out. Those that cannot find revenue sources beyond advertising will either go bust or be forced to admit that their site is a non-profit enterprise. If truth-in-advertising rules were enforced, most dotcoms would be dotorgs. The author’s attitude to the future of websites is______. A. distrustful B. pessimistic C. detesting D. optimistic

这道题的正确答案是 B. pessimistic（悲观的）。作者的整段论述都透露出对中小型网站未来的担忧和不看好。

下面这个表格梳理了文章中的关键事实和作者的观点，这能帮你清晰地看到作者的悲观态度是如何一步步建立的：

 选项辨析

• A. distrustful（不信任的）：作者是基于客观数据和行业现象进行分析，并非表达对某个对象的不信任。

• C. detesting（憎恶的）：文章是冷静的论述，没有表现出强烈的厌恶情感。

• D. optimistic（乐观的）：与全文的论调和结论完全相反。

文章的最后一句尤为关键：“如果广告真实性规则得到强制执行，大多数互联网公司（dotcoms）都会变成非营利组织（dotorgs）”。这是一种带有讽刺意味的假设，强烈暗示了在作者看来，当前许多网站的商业模型本身就是不可持续的，其未来命运注定黯淡。